Call Down the Stars

by Sue Harrison

  There are worse things than being warm and dry with a woman to watch over me, Water Gourd told himself. There are worse things than having Daughter safe. Then, with Daughter warm at his side and the tea filling his belly, Water Gourd slid into a gentle sleep.

  When he woke again, light streamed through the square hole in the roof of the earth iori. The woman and Daughter were sewing, and to Water Gourd’s surprise, when the woman spoke, Daughter answered. Sometimes the girl’s words were in the Boat People language, but other times she seemed to mimic the woman’s speech.

  How long had he slept? Through the turning of the moon? Through the seasons of a year? Or was Daughter still baby enough that words came easily, and she understood all languages?

  This time when he struggled to sit up, the world stayed still, and what little dizziness he felt soon passed. He leaned against his good right arm and thought about how to tell the woman that he needed to release his water, that his bladder was full to bursting.

  When he was sure he had his balance, he lifted the blanket that covered him and saw that he was naked. He leaned forward to gather the blanket around his waist and tried to ease himself to his knees. The woman looked up from her sewing and hissed, then rushed to help him. She lifted his arm over her shoulders, and slowly pulled him up. The world darkened until Water Gourd could see only a pinpoint of light, but he clenched his teeth and made himself stand until the darkness receded.

  He motioned toward his penis, covered as it was by the sleeping robe, said the word for urine, but the woman did not understand. Then he saw Daughter point to a gully that was dug where the floor met the earthen wall. Sunk into that gully was a large wooden trough. The woman helped him walk, moved with him step by step until he stood beside the trough. By the smell Water Gourd knew it held old urine.

  The women in his village also stored urine. When it ripened to a sharpness that burned the nostrils, it was good for many things—cleaning away fat or oil, preserving hides, killing the molds that rot grass mats during the rainy times of the year. But Boat women did not store the urine in their houses.

  He was used to privacy when he relieved himself, and though the woman turned her head, it took him some time to release his stream. Finally he was done, and she led him back to his bed, helped him sit.

  She offered him a bowl of broth, and he drank it greedily, surprised at his own hunger. When he had drained a second bowl, she knelt behind him, bracing his back with her knees, and began to knead his neck, so that under the pressure of her hands even the pain from his ghost arm lessened.

  She laid him gently against his bedding and stroked her fingers through his hair until finally he slept again, and this time his dreams were good.

  When Seal returned from his hunting trip, the First Men gathered in the chief hunter’s ulax. Though K’os usually sat in the least honored place—with the children, furthest from the seal oil lamp—this time she sat beside her husband, near the chief, beside his fat wife and her ugly daughter. K’os held herself straight and strong. She was old, but most men would rather come to her bed than to that of the chief’s daughter. She smiled as she thought of the day she and her husband Seal arrived at his village.

  The men, seeing her from a distance, had thought Seal had brought a young and beautiful woman to their village. Only when they came close did they realize that she was as old as a grandmother.

  Though she had not understood their language, she heard the tone of their words and knew they were ridiculing Seal. In her mind, she had given words to their jests. Why had Seal taken an old woman as wife? Even a young hunter could not hope to breed children from an old woman.

  Seal had responded with angry shouts and showed them the scars left from his wound. As he spoke, he gestured toward his rebuilt iqyax and often pointed at his leg, so K’os had known what he was telling them. Then he pulled her close, reached a hand down the neck of her parka, ignored the sudden laughter of the young men, and finally pulled out her river otter medicine bag. They were quiet then, those young men, stilled by the knowledge of the power she held in that bag, and their ridicule had stopped.

  Now, in the chief hunter’s lodge, she raised a hand and laid it against her chest where the bag hung, soft and dark, over her breasts. In the custom of the First Men, she had removed her sax when she entered the chief hunter’s ulax. To do otherwise would be an insult, a sign that the lodge was not warm enough for her.

  Yes, there was power in that otter bag, but she did not allow herself to think of how few packets of each medicine she still had, and how few of the plants she needed grew on this Sea Hunter island. She was learning the island foliage, but the women were reluctant to teach her, and none of them were well versed in plant medicines. She had learned about a poison from one of the young hunters, a gift of knowledge in exchange for an afternoon in her bed. The plant was deadly, and she had gathered some, dried it and kept it in packets marked with red string, knotted four times. There was a tall, heavy-stemmed green plant whose roots made a good poultice for sore muscles, and there were others that she had known before—yarrow and fireweed and ground-hugging willow—but she worried that her healing powers would diminish as her supplies were used. Then what would she do, an old woman, River as she was, and second wife?

  Better second wife than slave, she told herself. Seal had come at a good time, when her days with the Walrus Hunters were numbered. How terrible to find that the Walrus’s shaman Yehl did not want her. Even when she sneaked away from the slave’s lodge, crept to the warmth of his bed, stroked him out of his sleep—no matter what she did with hands or tongue or lips—he showed no desire for her.

  As her understanding of the Walrus language grew, she heard the whispers from his wives, how he shunned all of them, had welcomed no woman to his bed since K’os had come to live in the village. She heard the stories about Aqamdax and Chakliux and Sok, and what had happened to Yehl’s father because of them, and finally she understood that Yehl’s response to her had nothing to do with his desires, but rather with his fear of River People.

  Once a man could not hold his power over a woman, how would the spirits keep their respect? How long until the people did not want Yehl as their shaman? Then how long until Yehl decided that K’os had cursed him? Without doubt he would kill her. What hope did she have? Who would stand up for a slave?

  K’os chose a night of full moon to leave the Walrus Hunters’ village, and she had walked many days in the direction of the Traders’ Beach. Where else could she have gone? Not back to the River village. Not to the Four Rivers People. Only death awaited her at those places. What else was left but to go to the Sea Hunters? There she had the chance to earn herself some power. Perhaps she could find a shaman who might agree to use his own magic to destroy those who had tried to destroy her.

  She had been scouring a beach for driftwood when she heard Seal’s death song rising above the noise of the waves. She had followed that song up a slope of shale to a cave tucked into a cliff not far from the beach.

  A spirit of sickness had come into his body, given entrance by a gash that had laid his leg open to the bone. She had given him medicines, sewn up the wound, tended his fire, brought food and water. Sometime during the long days of his illness, he had begun to call her wife, and when he was well enough, she showed him that she had found the skin covering for his iqyax, had saved many of the pieces of its frame. They rebuilt it together, Seal carving the frame and K’os repairing the cover, and when he left to return to his own people’s village—a long journey of many days—he had asked K’os to come with him.

  Until then, she had been the strong one, the warrior, the shaman, but once they were in the First Men village, she needed him much more than he needed her. She still struggled with the First Men’s language, and it did not help that they were a people stingy with their words, spending long days saying nothing, the men watching the sea for seals and sea lions and fish, the women working in silence.

  She despaired over the few plants on t
he island, and she had to wait through a long winter before even beginning to gather the plants she did know and to learn about those she did not. She used her supply of medicines sparingly and hoped for broken bones and dislocated joints, but some spirit had cursed her. The First Men she lived among were a healthy people. Even in giving birth, the women seldom had need of her advice. All the babies that had been born since she arrived at the village had come head first, face down, as babies should.

  The First Men were short-legged, with thicker bones than the River People, with rounder heads and smaller noses. The women grew their hair long and bound it into tight buns at their necks or ears. They used a needle and charcoaled thread to draw broken lines across their cheeks and patterns of triangles on their thighs. The men marked their chins with long lines from lips to chins and wore thin ivory pins through the septums of their noses. They also pierced the skin at the corners of their mouths and set circles of ivory there, some nearly as large around as walrus tusks.

  Their faces, marked as such, were at first strange to her, but now she was able to see the beauty in the women’s marks, the fierceness in the men’s. So that if by chance she saw the reflection of her own face in a still tide pool, it seemed to be the face of a child, not yet complete.

  Though she was ranked as the lowest woman in the village, she was not a slave, and Seal treated her well. But with the arrival of the old man and the girl, her status had grown, and she sensed that both men and women watched her with no little fear, as though waiting to see whether she would fall under some curse or perhaps even a blessing. For after all, if their chief hunter carried the blood of people like these, could they truly be evil? And if K’os’s medicines had saved their lives, then she, too, must have more power than they had thought.

  K’os listened carefully as the First Men discussed what to do. They seemed in agreement that the girl should be allowed to grow up among them, though most women were afraid to take her into their own ulas. Finally the chief hunter spoke to Seal, asked if he were willing to keep her. Seal shrugged, glanced at K’os, and when K’os nodded, he ignored Eye-Taker’s anger and agreed.

  “As slave,” he said, “for my wife Old Woman.”

  Then K’os did what no second wife should do, spoke without asking her husband.

  “I will take her as daughter,” she said, and when Seal looked at her, his mouth and eyes opened wide in surprise, she bowed her head in deference, but quickly added, “I need someone to help me with my medicines. I am an old woman, and the healing powers I bring are River. These powers have been a good thing in your village.” She nodded toward her husband’s leg, and lifted her eyes at the chief hunter’s youngest son, who had cut his face in a fall against a rock. “But who can say what will happen to your children if I try to pass this knowledge on to one of them? River medicine might curse them. Better to take such a chance with this girl.”

  A murmur of agreement passed among the people, and Seal smiled at K’os. Eye-Taker hid her anger with a quick nod, and K’os again bowed her head in respect.

  “And the old man?” the chief hunter asked.

  An argument began among the hunters. Some wanted to kill him, others claimed he was a gift from the sea. Finally Seal spoke, and though he was a young man, he was known for having some wisdom, so even the elders stopped their grumbling to listen.

  “My wife tells me that he will most likely die. She has already had to cut off his arm, and he is old and weak. Why take the chance of cursing ourselves by making such a decision? Why not wait and see what happens? If he is a gift from the sea, then the sea will give him the strength to live. If he is not a gift, then he will die, for surely a man as old and sick as this one will not have the strength within himself to survive.”

  So in wisdom the decision was made, that both man and child would live, accepted as gifts. K’os hid her joy in her heart, and from that day began to teach Daughter the many ways of River medicine.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

  602 B.C.

  THE STORY WAS SHORT, but after Kuy’aa’s long stories about Chakliux and Aqamdax, Yikaas could understand the reason behind Qumalix’s brevity. The people began leaving the ulax, most pausing to speak to Qumalix.

  Yikaas pushed through to the back of the crowd. What better way to understand these Sea Hunters than to spend time alone here once everyone had left? Then he could try to see the world as they did, bound by the earthen walls of one of their lodges.

  He settled himself in the darkness behind the climbing log, pressed a hand against that log. Stripped of bark during its long sea journey to this island, the log must have its own tales to tell. Perhaps it longed to do so, listening as it must each day to stories from other mouths. But since a tree kept its voice within its leaves, maybe as a log it was content to be silent, preferring to listen rather than tell.

  He turned his thoughts to the Sea Hunters, and he wondered what it would be like to live so close to the sea, water that was both boundary and passage.

  He considered Qumalix’s stories. They were good, but not as fine as Kuy’aa’s. Yikaas closed his eyes and tried to imagine the old woman as a girl, how she must have looked and sounded. He wondered if she had been as good a storyteller then as Qumalix was now. Better, he told himself. She must have been better. How else could she be so good today, old as she was? Her skin seemed to be as thin as sea lion gut that had been softened by a woman’s knuckles into wrinkles beyond count, and her voice was as scored by age as her face.

  “Would you like some water?”

  The voice startled Yikaas, and he opened his eyes to see Qumalix standing before him, no longer storyteller, but only a woman, offering an ivory-stoppered seal bladder.

  He took it, pulled out the stopper, and drank. The water was good, so fresh that it barely carried the taste of the bladder. He handed it back, and she, too, drank, then sealed the bladder and hung it from a peg. She sat down on her haunches beside him, waved a hand before her face to clear away the oil lamp smoke that was sliding up the climbing log to the square hole in the ulax roof.

  “You are leaving now?” she asked, though he had not risen from his place behind the log.

  He had the advantage over her, since she sat in the light of the entrance hole while he was in darkness.

  “No,” he said, and asked, “are you leaving?”

  She focused her eyes on the climbing log, as if she had spoken to it rather than to him, as if it were a storyteller worthy of respect. “It is good, sometimes, to sit in this ulax alone,” she said. “In my village we do not have an ulax set aside for storytelling. I suppose here at the Traders’ Beach they have need of such a place with so many people visiting in spring and summer.”

  She paused as though she expected him to reply, but since she was talking to the log, he did not. Let the log say something, storyteller that it was.

  “The quietness gives me ideas,” she said. “Sometimes when the ulax is so crowded with people, it seems I hear their clamoring thoughts in my head, so that I forget what I had planned to say.”

  Her words surprised him. They so nearly echoed his own thoughts. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “To better understand your people. I had hoped to catch some of the thoughts and ideas they left behind.”

  Again Qumalix waved a hand before her face, coughed, and moved back out of the flow of smoke. “The lamp should be filled with whale oil,” she said. “It burns more cleanly, especially the oil of toothed whales.”

  Yikaas raised his eyebrows at her. He knew nothing about whales or whale oil lamps, and the realization of the many differences between them suddenly made him uncomfortable. “Wood fires smell better,” he said.

  “Sometimes we have beach fires,” she told him. “They do smell good, but usually we save the driftwood to build our ulas and for the men’s iqyax frames.”

  “You have no trees on your island?” he asked. Kuy’aa had told him that, but he could not imagine such a thing
. How did people live without trees?

  “Only willow, and they are not like the willow here.” She held a hand close to the floor. “They grow only this high and along the ground, but we use the bark for medicines, and the old women say that long ago the people sometimes split the roots to make gathering baskets. Grass baskets are better.”

  He merely grunted a reply. Why should a man think about baskets?

  Qumalix stood and said, “If you want to be alone here, I will go …”

  But Yikaas clasped her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “In the next storytelling will you speak about Daughter and how K’os raised her?” he asked.

  “No one wants to hear about that,” Qumalix said.

  “I do,” he told her.

  “The First Men have heard it before, and it is not very exciting. The best stories about Daughter and K’os happen later, when Daughter has become a woman, and K’os is so old that only the evil in her heart keeps her spirit tied to her body.”

  “If I hear a story about K’os raising Daughter, then perhaps I will better understand the enmity between K’os and Chakliux.”

  Qumalix tipped back her head as though she were studying the ulax rafters. She was pleasant to look at, once a man was used to Sea Hunter women with their round faces and small noses, their tattooed cheeks.

  “What can I tell you?” she asked, the question more to herself than to Yikaas. “Water Gourd, though he was not a man given to new and wise thoughts, was good at remembering the wisdom of others. Once he learned the First Men’s language—and he was more than a year in the learning—he shared the stories and wisdom that he had heard in the Boat People’s village. To the First Men, this was new wisdom, so Water Gourd earned a place with the elders, and though he had but one arm, he began to see himself as being more whole than he ever was as a young man.

  “K’os gave Daughter a new name—Uutuk, which means sea urchin, for K’os had found her washed up on the beach, a gift of the tides. K’os taught Uutuk plant medicine and how to set bones and pull broken teeth and ease fevers. Daughter grew in her own beauty, but K’os planned and worked to bend her into evil ways.”